I Am Zlatan Read online

  “That ride.”

  Anders Carlsson wasn’t the right guy for me. That was becoming increasingly obvious. I needed a different agent who wasn’t such a stickler for rules, and traffic lights. By chance, Anders had just left IMG and set up on his own, so he had given me a new contract to sign. But because I hadn’t done it yet, I was a free man. The only thing was, what was I going to do with my freedom? I didn’t have a clue, and in those days I didn’t have many people I could talk football with.

  I had Maxwell, of course, and a few others in the squad, but not really. There was so much competition everywhere and I didn’t know who I could trust, especially when it came to agents and transfers. Every single player in the team wanted to move up to the big clubs, and it felt like I needed somebody from the outside. I thought of Thijs.

  Thijs Slegers was a journalist. He had interviewed me for Voetbal International, and I’d liked him right away. We’d talked on the phone a bit after that interview. He became something of a sounding board, and even back then he had a good idea of what was what, I think. He knew what I was like and what kind of people I liked. I dialled his number and explained the situation:

  “I need to find a new agent. Who would be best for me?”

  Thijs is cool. He said, “Let me think about it!” And, sure, I let him think about it, I didn’t want to rush into anything.

  “Listen,” he said later. “There are two agents I can think of. One is the firm that works for Beckham. They’re supposed to be terrific, and then there’s another guy. But, well …”

  “Well, what?”

  “He’s a mafioso.”

  “Mafioso sounds good,” I said.

  “I suspected you would say that.”

  “Terrific. Set up a meeting!”

  The guy wasn’t actually a mafioso. He just looked and acted like one. His name was Mino Raiola, and I’d actually heard of him before. He was Maxwell’s agent, and he’d tried to get in touch with me via Maxwell a few months earlier. Because that’s the way he works. Mino always goes via intermediaries. He always says, “If you approach them yourself, you don’t have the upper hand. You’re standing there with your cap in your hand.” But it hadn’t worked too well with me – I’d just acted cocky, and I told Maxwell:

  “If he’s got something specific to bring to the table, he can show up, otherwise I’m not interested,” but Mino just sent this message: “Tell this Zlatan to go and fuck himself.” Although that had pissed me off at the time, I was getting excited now that I found out a little about him. I had grown up with that attitude, go fuck yourself and stuff. I feel comfortable with that council estate talk, and I suspected that Mino and I had similar backgrounds. Neither of us had been handed anything on a plate. Mino was born in southern Italy, in the province of Salerno. But when he was just a year old, his family moved to the Netherlands and opened a pizzeria in the city of Haarlem. Mino had to clean and wash dishes and help out as a waiter when he was a boy. But he worked his way up. He started looking after the books and that sort of thing.

  He started making something of himself even as a teenager. He was involved in thousands of things; he studied law, made deals and learned languages. He also loved football and wanted to become an agent early on. In the Netherlands there used to be a really crazy system where players had to be sold according to a price that was based on their age and a bunch of statistical crap, and he went against all that. He challenged the entire Dutch football association, and he didn’t start off dealing with small fry. Back in 1993 he sold Bergkamp to Inter, and in 2001 he got Nedvěd to Juventus for 41 million euro.

  Even so, Mino wasn’t all that big, not yet, but he was considered to be on his way up, and he was completely fearless and prepared to pull any number of tricks, and that sounded good. I didn’t want to have another nice boy. I wanted to be transferred and get a good contract, and so I decided to make an impression on this Mino. When Thijs set up a meeting for us at the Okura Hotel in Amsterdam, I wore my cool brown leather jacket from Gucci. I had no intention of being the idiot in the tracksuit who gets screwed over again. I put on my gold watch and drove there in my Porsche, and I parked right outside just to be safe.

  It was like, here I come, and I went into the Okura, and, well, that hotel! It’s right alongside the Amstel Canal and is amazingly elegant and luxurious, and I thought, this is it, I’ve got to play it cool now, and I went into the sushi restaurant in the hotel. We’d booked a table there, and I didn’t really know what sort of person to expect, probably some sort of pinstriped fella with an even bigger gold watch. But who the hell turned up? A bloke in jeans and a Nike T-shirt – and that belly, like one of the guys in the Sopranos.

  Was he supposed to be an agent, that weirdo? And then when we ordered, what do you think they brought us? A few pieces of sushi with avocado and prawns? We got a massive spread, enough to feed five people, and he started stuffing himself. But then he started talking, and he was really sharp and to the point. There was no candy-coated crap, and I knew immediately that this was going to work, it was sounding great, and I said to myself, I want to work with this guy. We think alike. I was all set to shake hands on a deal.

  But do you know what he did, that cocky bastard? He took out four pages of A4 paper he’d printed off the internet. They had a bunch of names and numbers on them, like Christian Vieri, 27 matches, 24 goals. Filippo Inzaghi, 25 matches, 20 goals; David Trézéguet, 24 matches, 20 goals and finally, Zlatan Ibrahimović, 25 matches, 5 goals.

  “You think I’m going to be able to sell you with statistics like these,” he said, and I thought, what is this, some kind of attack?

  But I retaliated. “If I’d scored 20 goals even my mother could have sold me,” and silenced him. He wanted to laugh, I know that now. But he carried on with his game. He didn’t want to lose the upper hand.

  “You are right. But you…”

  Now what? I thought. It felt like there was another attack coming.

  “You think you’re pretty great, huh?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You think I’m going to be impressed by your watch, your jacket, your Porsche. But I’m not. Not at all. I just think it’s ridiculous.”

  “All right!”

  “Do you want to become the best in the world? Or the one who earns the most and can swan around in this kind of gear?”

  “Best in the world!”

  “Good! Because if you become the best in the world, you’ll get the other stuff, too. But if you’re just after the money, you won’t end up with anything, you get that?”

  “I get it.”

  “Think about it, and let me know,” he said, and we concluded the meeting. I left and felt, okay, I’ll think about it. I can play it a little cool too and let him wait. But I’d hardly got into my car before I started feeling antsy. I phoned him up.

  “Listen, I don’t like waiting, I want to start working with you right away.”

  He was silent.

  “All right,” he said. “But if you’re going to work with me, you have to do what I tell you.”

  “Sure, absolutely.”

  “You’re going to sell your cars. You’re going to sell your watches and start training three times as hard. Because your stats are crap.”

  Your stats are crap! I should have told him to go to hell. Sell my cars? What did they have to do with him? He was going too far, no doubt about it. But still, he was right, wasn’t he? I gave him my Porsche Turbo. Not just to be a good boy, for its own sake. It was just as well I got rid of that car, to be honest. I was just going to kill myself in it. But things didn’t stop there.

  I started driving around in the club’s lame little Fiat Stilo, and I put away my gold watch. I put on an ugly Nike watch instead, and went round in tracksuits again. Things were going to be tough now, and I trained for all I was worth. I pushed myself to the limit, and it struck
me that all that stuff was true. I had been too pleased with myself, thinking I was all that. But it was the wrong attitude.

  It was true that I hadn’t scored enough goals and I’d been too lazy. I hadn’t been motivated enough. I was realising that even more, and began to give everything I had in training and matches. But it’s true, it isn’t easy to change overnight. You start off at full tilt, then you can’t be bothered. Fortunately I didn’t have a chance to slack off. Mino was on me like a leech.

  “You like it when people tell you you’re the best, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  “But that’s not true. You’re not the best. You’re shit. You’re nothing. You’ve got to work harder.”

  “You’re the one who’s shit. All you do is nag. You should train yourself.”

  “Go fuck yourself.”

  “Fuck you.”

  Things often got aggressive between us, or rather, it seemed aggressive. But that’s how we were brought up, and of course I got it, that whole attitude, ‘you’re nothing’ and all that, was just his way of getting me to change my attitude, and I really think he succeeded. I started saying those things to myself.

  “You’re nothing, Zlatan. You’re shit. You’re not even half as good as you think you are! You’ve got to work harder.”

  It got me going, and a got more of a winner’s mindset. There was no more talk of getting sent home by the coach. I put everything into every situation and I wanted to win every little match or competition, even in training sessions, and, sure, I had some pain then in my left groin. But I didn’t care. I just kept going. I had no intention of giving in. Didn’t even care that it was getting worse and worse. I gritted my teeth. Several other players in the squad were injured then. I didn’t want to give the manager any more problems, and I often played on painkillers. Tried to just ignore it. But Mino could see it – he realised. He wanted me to work hard, not break myself.

  “This can’t go on, fella,” he said. “You can’t play injured.” I finally started taking it seriously and went to see a specialist, and it was decided that I would have an operation.

  At the Rotterdam University Hospital they inserted a reinforcement in my left groin, and afterwards I had to rebuild my strength in the club’s training pool. That was no fun. Mino told the physio that I’d had it too easy.

  “This guy has just been swanning around, having fun. Now he’s got to be made to fight and tire himself out! Really give it to him.”

  I had to wear a damned heartbeat monitor and some kind of life vest that held me up, and then I would run in the water until I reached my absolute maximum level, and afterwards I was ready to puke my guts out. I collapsed by the edge of the pool. I just had to rest. I couldn’t move. I was totally exhausted, and one time I needed to pee, it got worse and worse. But there was no way I’d make it to the toilet. There was a hole by the side of the pool so I pissed into that hole. What else could I do? I was completely finished.

  We had a disciplinary rule at Ajax: we weren’t allowed to go and eat until they said “Dismissed”, and I would often make a break for it as soon as I heard the first syllable. I was always ravenously hungry. Now I couldn’t even raise my head. No matter how much they shouted, I just lay there like a wreck by the side of the pool.

  I kept that up for two weeks, and the strange thing is, it wasn’t just hard work. There was something pleasant in that pain. I enjoyed the opportunity to exert myself to the point of exhaustion, and I started to understand what hard work means. I entered a new phase and felt stronger than I had for a long time. When I returned after my physiotherapy, I gave everything I had on the pitch, and now I started to dominate.

  I gained self-confidence, and posters started appearing – ‘Zlatan, the son of God’, that sort of thing. People shouted my name. I became better than ever, and of course it was terrific, but it was also the same as always: when somebody shines, there are others who get jealous. There was already some tension in the squad, particularly among the younger players who also wanted to get noticed and get sold to the big clubs.

  I imagine that Rafael van der Vaart was one who wasn’t entirely pleased about these developments. Rafael was probably one of the most popular players in the country then. He was certainly the favourite among those fans who didn’t really like foreigners on the pitch, and Ronald Koeman made him team captain, even though Rafael was no more than 21 years old. I’m sure it was a massive ego boost for him, and he was also the main quarry for the tabloid press. He’d got together with some celeb chick, and maybe it wasn’t so easy for him to deal with my successes on the pitch in those circumstances. I bet Rafael saw himself as the big star and didn’t want to have a rival. I dunno. He was also desperate for a transfer, just like all the rest of us. He’d do anything to get ahead, I think. Then again, it’s true, I didn’t know him, and I didn’t care, either.

  This was early summer in 2004, and the tensions between us didn’t really explode until August. In May and June things were still pretty cool. We’d secured the league title again, and Maxwell, my mate, was voted the best player of the series, and I was happy for him. If there’s anyone I don’t begrudge anything, it’s him, and I remember we drove to Haarlem to eat at the pizzeria where Mino had grown up, and I talked to Mino’s sister there. There was one thing she said she was wondering about. It was about their father. “Dad’s started driving around in a Porsche Turbo,” she said. “It’s a bit odd, really. It’s not exactly the sort of car he’s had in the past. Is it anything to do with you?”

  “Your dad …”

  I missed that Porsche, but I hoped it was in safer hands now, and that summer I really wanted to stay away from crazy stuff and just focus on football. The European Championship tournament was coming up in Portugal. This was my first big international tournament where I was an established member of the Swedish national side, and I remember Henrik ‘Henke’ Larsson rang me up. Henke was a role model for me. He was finishing up his time at Celtic then. He would be sold to Barcelona after that summer, and right after our loss to Senegal in the World Cup he’d declared, “I’m not going to play for the national side any longer. I want to focus on my family.” Of course, you had to buy it, especially from a guy like him.

  But he was missed. We were going to be playing in the same group as Italy and needed all the strong players we could get hold of, and I guess most people had lost hope in him then. But now he was saying he regretted his decision and wanted back in, and that made me perk up.

  Now it would be me and him up front. That would make us stronger, and I could sense each day how the pressure on us was increasing, and there was more and more talk about how this could be my big international breakthrough, and I realised everybody was going to be watching me, including scouts and coaches from abroad. In the days before we left for the tournament, the fans and the journalists were swarming around me, and in situations like that it was nice to have Henke there. He’d been involved in some high-level uproar himself, but the commotion surrounding me was absolutely insane then, and I’ll never forget how I asked him later on, “Bloody hell, Henke, what should I do? If anybody should know, it’s you. How should I deal with all this?”

  “Sorry, Zlatan. You’re on your own now. There’s no player in Sweden who’s ever experienced this kind of circus before!”

  Like, there was a Norwegian who turned up one time with a damn orange. People had been going on about oranges ever since John Carew, who was with Valencia, had criticised my playing, and I responded:

  “What John Carew does with a football, I can do with an orange,” and now this Norwegian journalist was there and wanted me to show what I could do with a piece of fruit.

  But, I mean, come on, why should I make that guy famous as well? Why should I perform his little trick?

  “You can take your orange, peel it and eat it up. It’ll give you some good vitamins,” I said, and of course, that beca
me a thing in the media as well – like, get a load of him, all cocky and arrogant – and there was more and more being said about how my relation with the media was so tense.

  But really, was that so strange?

  11

  NOBODY KNEW ABOUT HELENA and me, not even her mum. We’d made a huge effort to keep it a secret. The tiniest thing about me made headlines, and we didn’t want journalists to go digging around in our relationship before we even knew where it was going.

  We did everything we could do throw them off our trail, and early on we benefited from our differences. Nobody could believe I was with someone like her, a career woman eleven years older than me. If we were spotted in the same place, like a hotel or something, the penny still didn’t drop, and that was lucky. That helped us. But all that sneaking around had its price.

  Helena lost some friends and felt isolated and alone, and I got more furious than ever with the media. The previous year I’d flown to Gothenburg to play in an international match against San Marino. Things had started to loosen up at Ajax by then, and I was in a good mood and was talking fairly freely, like in the old days, including with a journalist from the Aftonbladet tabloid. I really hadn’t forgotten what that paper did with the episode at Spy Bar. But I didn’t want to hold a grudge, so I was chatting away, even talking about starting a family in the future – nothing unusual, not at all. It was just idle chat – stuff like, it’d be nice to have kids sometime in the future. But do you know what that journalist did?

  He wrote up his article in the form of a personal ad: ‘Who wants to win the Champions League with me? Sporty bloke, aged 21, 6 foot 4, 84 kg with dark hair and eyes, seeks woman of suitable age for a serious relationship,’ he wrote, and what do you think? Was I happy? I was outraged. I mean, what sort of respect did that show? A personal ad! I wanted to deck that bastard, so it wasn’t a very happy occasion when I encountered him the very next day in the dark tunnel in the stadium leading out to the pitch.